Every book starts somewhere. A question, an image, a memory that won’t let go. For the Night Buddies series, it started with a little boy who had trouble falling asleep, a father who refused to let that be a problem, and one night when a red crocodile named Crosley showed up and changed everything.
If you’ve read the books, you know Crosley. You know John. What you might not know is that both of them are real, or were, once, in the way that the best fictional characters always start out real before they become something larger.
A father who didn’t expect any of this
Sands Hetherington didn’t set out to be a stay-at-home dad. It wasn’t a plan he had made or a life he had imagined for himself. But after his divorce, he found himself with full custody of a young son named John, no roadmap, and no other dads around who had done anything like it. What he had was time, love, and a stubborn commitment to making John’s childhood as full and as adventurous as possible.
What followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Sands and John spent summers driving through forty-eight states and five Canadian provinces. They did little league football, basketball, baseball, boxing, golf, boating, and camping. John got a St. Bernard puppy named Henry. There were sports honors, academic awards, a year in Germany. And every night, before John went to sleep, there were stories.
The night Crosley appeared
Sands had always believed in reading. He stocked up on everything: Grimm, Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, eventually Dickens and Victor Hugo. But one night when John was about seven, Sands suggested something different. Instead of reading someone else’s story, why not create a bedtime companion of John’s own? A character who would keep him company while he slept.
John invented Crosley: a red crocodile with a particular kind of energy, the sort of companion who shows up after dark when the rest of the world has gone quiet and suggests that maybe the night isn’t something to sleep through after all. Night after night, Sands and John made up stories together. Crosley became, as Sands has put it, another member of their little family.
When John grew up
The same boy whose kindergarten teacher once suggested he might have a learning disability went on to earn an M.A. from Edinburgh University with honors in Russian and German. He speaks ten languages. He grew up and started traveling the world, creating his own adventures.
And Sands, who had spent years watching that boy grow, decided he didn’t want to forget any of it. He took his memories of John and Crosley and the Borough and all those bedtime stories, and he turned them into books. Not to become a children’s book author. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was simply to hold onto something that mattered. The books were the way to do it.
Why it matters that you know this
A lot of middle grade books are good. Some are genuinely great. But not many of them start the way Night Buddies started as a real father and a real kid, lying awake after bedtime, inventing a friend together because the dark felt a little too quiet.
When your kid reads about John sneaking out for a midnight adventure with a red crocodile, they’re reading something that was told, out loud, in a real room, to a real child who needed it. That’s not a small thing. That’s exactly what the best stories are made of.
If you want to read more about how Sands got here, his full backstory is worth your time. You can find it on the blog, and it will make the books feel a little different the next time you pick one up.